I have no idea how long this price will last, but £2.09 each for some of the most startling albums ever recorded is just insane. I already own legitimate copies of half of these, but I just ordered the set anyway.

I’ve not written about Joni anywhere near as much as I ought to have. I listed her Hejira (one of the albums included in the box-set) among my top ten for 2011, but there I hardly praised it as it deserves. In fact it’s a quite unique blend of folk, jazz, confessional singer-songwriter and what can only be described as impressionism — a coherent but haunting whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. [Update: I later wrote about it in much more detail.]

And then there is Blue — an album I’ve been listening to for more than a decade, but which suddenly grabbed me by the throat earlier this year so that I hardly listened to anything else for a solid fortnight. The songs burrow into the mind, leaving scars — not just for the musicianship, but for the searing combination of honesty and ambiguity. This is music that lays utterly bare the soul of someone who doesn’t quite know what she wants.

5 responses to “Get your absurdly cheap Joni Mitchell box-sets”

That’s actually slightly more than I bought it for two weeks back (think it was £19.99 then), so I imagine it’ll stay around that price for a while.
I do love this new age of ridiculously cheap music. Practically every week for the last few months I’ve been picking up box sets of stuff by Duke Ellington, or Miles Davis, or Joni Mitchell, or Ray Charles, or Nilsson, or Randy Newman, or… for less than I paid for coffee in the same week. The only problem is finding time to listen to it all.

Yes, finding time is a real issue! That’s especially true with Joni Mitchell, whose songs and soundscapes are complex enough that they need a lot of listening before they yield up all their treasures. To my surprise, I find one of the best venues for really listening (as opposed to just having music on in the background) is when I’m driving. It seems the process of driving itself takes up just enough of my concious mind to keep my alert, but also leaves me free to really hear the detail of what’s being sung and played.